SONGDO LIBRARY — SUPERSPATIAL

SUPERSPATIAL

IS A MULTIDISCIPLINARY OFFICE, BASED IN MILAN, THAT USES ARCHITECTURE AS A TOOL TO TRANSFORM CONTEXTS AND TO CHALLENGE THE TRADITIONAL WAY OF THINKING.

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SONGDO LIBRARY

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LOCATION
YEAR

SEOUL, KOREA
2020

The long history of libraries shows how the concept of this typology changed over the centuries. The library started as a space for book preservation, a fortress to defend culture and knowledge. The great library of Alexandria or the libraries of the Shang dinasty in China where places to protect and store ancient knowledge. During middle ages, in Europe, libraries had been turned into production sites, with laboratories designed under perfect light in order to copy books and manuscripts, where storing and reading activities gained equal importance. The invention of printing techniques, which happened in Korea 400 years before Gutenberg, changed libraries once again. The production of books moved to typographies and factories and the library became a place for book conservation and reading. Today, internet changed again the way of storaging knowledge. The informations contained in a library building can be easily stored in a USB stick. The books in a library have been starting to become an element of tradition and memory, a guise to create a public building rather than a real necessity.
The new library of Songdo si a place for the city, an open ground that welcomes a variety of public activities and social interactions. A public space for the neighborhood, a place for culture, public exchange and interaction. The whole space is conceived as one body within which space and form coexist in harmonic order as in traditional Korean architecture.
The new library of Songdo is a place for community, a symbol of publicness. It is liberated from the physical condition of storage of books and its constraints. The library can become a square, it can become a garden. A space that breathes in synergy with the city, with no limit between inside and outside, where the only limit is given by its boundaries: a translucent wall that protects the inside establishing a special place.
The whole space is conceived as one body within which space and form coexist in harmonic order as in traditional Korean architecture. The building and the site overlaps on the same idea. The area is treated as a building and the building itself is conceived as an open space, as a park. The concept of the library embraces the whole site in order to have a physical presence related to the context, generating protected but accessible public spaces. The design proposal moves from the western idea of a building opposed to an open public space. It uses these elements in a different and original way: public space, landscape, and interior spaces are merged, giving birth to a new idea of public building.
Taking inspiration from the formal structure and distribution flows of the Korean temples and houses, the building is based on a free grid of courtyards, gardens, corridors and larger reading areas sourrounded by the landscape and natural light. The division between functions and inside/outside is imperceptible, as thin as a paper sheet, thanks to the large amount of glass surfaces proposed.